carefully everywhere
by Laetitia Prism
Summary: And when Sesshomaru dreams there are small hands pulling on his empty sleeve and playing with the ties of his armour.'


. carefully everywhere

* * *

He thinks of Rin rarely. Her absence is like a small stone worn into him and subsequently covered again by flesh, and grates from time to time when he sees green spilling out of the package that Jaken carries in a stranglehold about Nintoujou.

Occasionally it occurs to him, at the thawing of winter when the colours of cream and orange creep into his vision, that Rin would long since have outgrown the matching yukata. He does not point this out to Jaken. Nor does he mention at the falling and decaying of leaves that as such were her clothes when he had found her.

But that is not true, for she had found him first. Now that she is gone again the conflicts of human and youkai no longer concern him, and what he knows of such matters he hears by chance. To the north are the yourouzoku and their wolves; some are made bold by their leader's presence at the final battle, and prey on human villages again. He hears rumours of whole packs purified by powerful miko, of restless murmurs for retribution, but they do not impinge on his domain and are of no interest to him.

He wanders his lands as on white wind, across grey mountains and darkened forests where she has never been.

And when Sesshomaru dreams there are small hands pulling on his empty sleeve and playing with the ties of his armour. He knows this is foolishness, but not the same as that which brought his father to death.

* * *

His brother is sullen, kicking at leaves as he trails Sesshomaru through the forest in which he slept for fifty years, bound so humiliatingly by a human arrow. Sesshomaru vaguely regrets that Kikyo's soul should have revived him again so soon. If Inuyasha would still fly raging at him on sight, spouting inarticulate accusations, then the lesson, he feels, was not driven home.

But since the defeat of Naraku he has lost all interest in his brother. He is the Lord of the Western Lands, and it is not their place to question his retinue.

'She is not of your concern,' he says to the girl Kagome, standing at the lip of the well, and wonders if he would recognise Rin in another body.

'She protected me from Setsuna no Takemaru,' she says, irrelevantly. 'The child who stands between you and the walking dead, who waits and will not save herself, is very much of your concern, Sesshomaru-sama.'

He has never had his name used against him as a weapon.

'She did not think that later he would rescue her from another monster, only to stab her and leave her bleeding into the snow. She did not think she would end her life among strangers in the hut of a village miko.'

Kagome looks at him, clear-eyed and calm now, and with all of Kikyo's erstwhile powers she is still no match for his glacial indifference.

'Then she is a fool for waiting.'

He leaves them in the forest where their own wait had begun, and was now ended. The ending has contented them, and he does not think it strange that neither hanyou nor miko should seek to avenge Rin. Nor is it the first time that she has been abandoned by her kind. The jewel glows against Kagome's throat and against the muted shine of green leaves, but Sesshomaru knows no desire that he may seek through the souls of lesser youkai.

And when Sesshomaru dreams there are small hands locked about the sheath of Tenseiga. He knows this is foolishness, and does not hold the sword anticipating warmth.

* * *

He finds the scent of Inuyasha and Kagome gone from the village, and the miko who sights him along bow and arrow is old. The lines of her face, long steeped in human care and misery, follow those of her sister's even after a lifetime. Kikyo too, he remembers, had once saved Rin, at Hakureizan; nor had he required her interference.

Jaken is too cowed to announce him, but she appears to already know his name.

'The hanyou your brother is not present. He has travelled north to visit the yourouzoku Kouga.'

By chance he knows of the wolf's humiliation at human hands. By chance he hears of others seeking to fill the void still remaining, years after Naraku's demise. He has reason to know that time passes slowly for youkai.

'I do not seek Inuyasha.'

He endures her silent contemplation and the reek of the houses behind her. He thinks she could have saved them from neither wolves nor bandits.

At length she lowers the bow. 'The villagers found her,' she tells him, and he wonders if he would ever have heard Rin's voice so worn by time. 'And when they brought her to me she was already dying. I do not know if that is what you wished to hear.'

He had sought her soul back from death, her body from wolves, her voice from terror. The earth and mortality had no claim on her. She should have been his to keep, forever if he so wished.

'You did not inform Inuyasha.'

'They did not see the youkai clearly; he wore white, and was indistinct against the snow. And I promised her, before she died, that I would not tell.'

But he knows he is not so strong that he could defeat Time, and she would have died in the snow, regardless. Summer would fade and the swansong of autumn seep into her bones, and lie waiting until winter swallowed the blood-flowers under her skin.

'You broke your promise.' For a moment he feels the bone-deep impulse to bloodshed, but Rin is dead and the promise already broken, and it was not this miko who had killed her.

'I am old,' she says simply. 'It is not right that a child be murdered and none remember it.'

And when Sesshomaru dreams there are small hands glowing around fireflies. He knows this is foolishness, and does not think of those same hands lying half-curled, like muddied flowers, on the forest floor.

* * *

He finds her on a hilltop within the boundary of his lands, just south of the yourouzoku. She is grown, formalised into the red and white of her kind so that in eight years she has not ceased bleeding into the snow. The wind stirs the clean lines of her clothes and the grasses at her feet, and in the autumn sunlight the shade of his wild, laughing creature looks out of her much changed face.

It disconcerts him to realise that he does not know how old she is, how much time remains to her.

She stands quietly as he approaches, and at fifty paces reiatsu crackles like lightning over his skin. Jaken cries, 'Rin!' and runs toward her; only the shortness of his legs prevents him being burned away entirely.

'Sumimasen, Jaken-sama. Sesshomaru-sama.' Her voice is awkward with disuse, like tarnished silver. He thinks she will never sing again, and does not know whom to fault for it.

'I had been told,' he says carefully, because it is the only thing he can think to say, 'that you died.'

She averts her face, looks down along the slope to the western horizon. 'No, Sesshomaru-sama. It was the miko of Inuyasha-san's village who nursed me back to health. Kaede-obaasan told me... told me that it was dangerous for me to stay at the village, and sent me to train at the shrine.'

He wishes for her to look at him. He wishes to ask if she has been within the kekkai of the shrine these many years where he did not find her.

'Before I left the village Kaede-obaasan cast a charm to keep me from being found. It was broken when Kouga-san recognised me.' Something must show in his face, and she pulls anxiously on the ties of her sleeve. 'Please do not be angry with her. Kaede-obaasan meant to shield me from Naraku ... and she feared I had inconvenienced Sesshomaru-sama.'

He thinks of telling her that it had inconvenienced him to seek for her, when unlike the first time there had been no trail deliberately laid for him to follow. He thinks of telling her that he would have sought her despite greater inconvenience by far.

'You have!' Jaken's voice is shrill with indignation. 'Sesshomaru-sama deferred his triumph over Naraku and searched throughout the land after you were taken, while you were hiding among humans. I had half a mind not to take you with us when Kouga said you'd learned that infernal craft!'

Jaken had not accompanied him on his hunt for Rin and her captors. Jaken only knows he had returned with dried blood staining the small scrap of green silk and his empty hands.

'Purifying Kouga to his last stinking breath gave a perfect excuse for all the power-hungry youkai to gather against you, you foolish girl! They'll bait you as he did, but at least they dare not harm you when Sesshomaru-sama -- has just graciously kicked in my unworthy head...'

He is the Lord of the Western Lands, like his father before him, but unlike his father he knows need neither to protect anyone nor to announce the intention of it.

'Sesshomaru-sama honours me,' and her voice rings like a small, dying bell. 'But I cannot go. If they intend to attack the village as Kouga-san did then I must stop them; nor can I involve Sesshomaru-sama further.'

Behind him Jaken fumbles with Nintoujou, but her eyes never leave his face. The obi flutters weakly to her feet, green on green. 'Ungrateful child! Have you forgotten how your own kind abandoned you, how Sesshomaru-sama took in you in, now that you have someone else to clothe you? For that you would face the most vicious of youkai alone with a village cowering at your back? For that you would deny him?'

She sinks slowly to the ground, holds the silk in open hands. Her skirts pool around her like blood and the sharp white lines, one across each palm, shine smooth in the sunlight.

'Forgive me, Jaken-sama. Sesshomaru-sama. I cannot go. I know what it is to be entirely powerless, and what it is to expect the protection of someone else.'

He has never known a miko unable to control her own power, but neither has he encountered reiatsu brought on by great pain or sudden suffering. And he is not a daiyoukai for nothing. In two steps he is at her side, and gives her no warning because he wishes not to see her flinch a second time.

The wound has not healed cleanly. Chips from breastbone and rib lie within her like jewels, and against the torn line of the white chihaya her left shoulder rests skewed and stiff. Her skin burns against his.

'Had I struck you with Toukijin, you would not have lived.'

'I know,' she tells him, 'I always knew, even when he had your face.' Her tears fall stinging onto his hand and he moves neither to avoid them nor to wipe them away. He thinks she has saved for him each small word, had spoken them to no one else in the long years lost to enchantment and dreaming.

At length she sighs, takes dried herbs from her sleeve for Jaken's burns. He thinks to seize both her hands in his and carry her away by force, but he does not.

He does not say, Come away with me and pick flowers again for their own sake. He does not say, Race with me again across the sky. He does not say, Walk with me again beneath the moon.

He tells her, like the last time, that it is her choice, and like the last time he does not look back to see whether she follows.

And when Sesshomaru dreams there are small hands sliced open against the blades of Toukijin. He knows this is foolishness, and does not draw the sword expecting blood.

* * *

He acknowledges his brother with a punch to the face. The force of it knocks Inuyasha halfway to the centre of the fray and Sesshomaru, airborne and parallel to his prgress, speaks into one tufted ear. 

'She is dying. Let that lesson you not to meddle in my affairs.'

Inuyasha stumbles backward, gracelessly into the arms of an overgrown gibbon. Half a battlefield away Kagome is screaming for Rin to stop. 'We're here to help Rin-chan, not you. Do you think Kaede meant for her to be made into live mayose?' He swats the youkai with the flat of Tessaiga without looking and clears half an acre. 'It's enough that she was parted from you. What Naraku did to Kikyo and me,' Inuyasha says quietly, wiping blood from his mouth, 'not even you deserve.'

His father died to keep faith with a mortal woman. His brother lost faith in one incarnation and found it again with another of the same soul. Sesshomaru knows nothing himself of faith, except that with magic and falsehood they had kept her from him, but she is his and he would always, always find her, in this world or any other.

Through the press of misshapen youkai bodies her reiatsu passes unchecked, creeping like snowflakes into his clothes and burning with cold. He steps away from Inuyasha and makes his way toward her, and the corpses in his path are thrown aside without notice. He has not seen her wield any weapon, but her skin is translucent as paper and beneath it lightning flows among the traceries of her blood. Blindly she looks at him. She is failing, failing.

At his side Toukijin hangs silent and unsullied. 'You are mine.' The nearest youkai falls twitching away from them and he flicks his claws clean against one thumb. 'Any who touch you shall die.'

The taste of blade through bone and yielding flesh runs within his fingertips and below the skin of his palm, and makes him eight years guilty of every accusation.

Sunlight calls up fire in her hair and falls on the silence between them. Into her hollowness he thinks of pouring blood and breath, thinks of stopping both with his own hands from seeping through her skin. 'Sesshomaru-sama,' she sighes, and with her firefly glow dulled by reiatsu and bloodlight and the shadow of death she captivates him still.

He bears her west, towards the sunset, her thin body bleeding wildflowers into the white of his sleeve.

And when Sesshomaru dreams there are small hands tangled in his hair and caught in the knots of his sash. He knows this is foolishness and he does not care.

* * *

For J., comrade in affliction and fellow Sesshomaru fangirl, to whom I owe much. 

Footnotes:  
1. _reiatsu_: shameless pilfering from Bleach, the cast of which was clearly created with redeeming the phonetically unappealing phrase embarrassment des riches in mind. Also I don't know what the canon terminology was ;  
2. _mayose_: the Episode of the Rats, or specifically the GMO tree in it.  
3. _bloodlight_: that thing that Piero Strozzi talks about in Checkmate after his reconnaissance mission to Sevigny, except that was I think in Italian and I believe in linguistic consistency. (Actually I was too lazy to bus halfway across town for the nearest library copy of the book.)

and, um, Rin's Sparkly Miko Powers(TM), the origins thereof... well Mercedes Lackey did it in Magic's Pawn (I can't believe I'd admit to having read it O God even if it was during my histrionic misspent youth) so I don't see why I shouldn't do it too. Nyah.

Endnotes: Brought on last September by e.e. cummings ("somewhere I have never travelled") but carried through -- after about a year during which yours truly was Distracted (augh) -- by Josh Groban (double augh) and, em, S.H.E. ('scuse me while I commit seppuku), as a direct result of which wallowing musical sentiment (le Groban) and triumphant spinelessness (Super star) Sesshomaru turned out a right bastard. Poetic, mind you, but insufferable. Silly puppy.

is bitten

Oh, there goes my writing hand.


End file.
